WASHINGTON - A former Texas policewoman was convicted of murder Tuesday for shooting dead a neighbor in his own home in what her lawyer said was a "tragic mistake."
The case sparked outrage as it became a flashpoint over police violence and racial bias because Amber Guyger is white, while her victim was black.
Guyger, who worked in Dallas, claimed that she believed she had returned to her own apartment on September 6, 2018 and that she thought Botham Jean, 26, was an intruder.
In fact, the 31-year-old had entered Jean's unlocked apartment, located in the same building but one floor above hers.
"We the jury unanimously find the defendant, Amber Guyger, guilty of murder as charged in the indictment," the jury foreman announced.
After the verdict was read, Jean's mother, Allison Jean, stood and looked upward as she celebrated the decision, raising her arms high and wide.
"I cannot sleep, I cannot eat, it's just been the most terrible time for me," she later told the jury that will decide on Guyger's sentence.
"I try to busy myself to try to get this out of my head. It is very difficult."
The jury, which retired on Monday, deliberated for five hours before delivering its guilty verdict.
Guyger, who was off duty after a nearly 14-hour shift, lived in apartment 1378 on the third floor, while Jean lived in apartment 1478 directly above her.
"She knows she's made a tragic mistake, but it's not out of evil," Guyger's lawyer, Robert Rogers, told the court when the trial opened, describing it as human error and an act of self-defense.
Guyger -- a police officer for four years until her sacking following the shooting -- sobbed when she took the stand last week.
APPEALS FOR JUSTICE
"I ask God for forgiveness, and I hate myself every single day," she said, voice trembling.
"I wish he was the one with the gun who had killed me. I never wanted to take an innocent person's life."
After hearing the verdict, Guyger stood as the jury filed out of the courtroom and then sank into her chair.
Prosecutor Jason Hermus said Jean, a native of the Caribbean island of St. Lucia who worked for an accounting firm, "paid the ultimate price" for Guyger's errors.
"She walks past 16 different apartments and fails to register the number four on any one of them," Hermus said during the testimony phase of the trial last week.
Prosecutors played Guyger's frantic 911 call, in which she repeatedly tells a dispatcher she is in the wrong apartment.
Bodycam footage from responding officers showed them trying to save his life as he lay bleeding, US media reported.
The shooting and its aftermath sparked demonstrations and appeals for justice in a nation where white police officers who shoot people of color often go free.
Demonstrators rallied outside the Dallas police headquarters and city hall.
Jurors were given the option of finding Guyger guilty of the lesser offense of manslaughter, but a grand jury indicted her on the more serious charge of murder following the protests.
She faces up to life in prison when she is expected to be sentenced later Tuesday.
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source: news.abs-cbn.com
DALLAS - A Dallas police officer missed clues including the smell of marijuana when she entered an apartment she believed was her own and shot dead a man eating a bowl of ice cream, a prosecutor said on Monday at the start of the former officer's murder trial.
Amber Guyger, who is white, has told investigators in Texas that she mistook 26-year-old Botham Jean, who is black, for a burglar after she mistakenly entered his central Dallas apartment one floor above hers.
Assistant District Attorney Jason Hermus told the jury of four men and 12 women that Guyger had a 16-minute phone conversation with her former partner, with whom she had a romantic relationship, on the way home from work that night after a 13-1/2 hour shift.
"Whatever is on her mind after that conversation has consumed her attention entirely," Hermus said in his opening statement.
The shooting, one of a series of high-profile killings of unarmed black men and teens by white U.S. police, sparked street protests, particularly because prosecutors initially moved to charge Guyger, 31, with manslaughter, a charge for killing without malice that carries a lesser sentence than murder.
In contrast to cases like the killings of Michael Brown in Missouri and Philando Castile in Minnesota, Guyger shot Jean, a PwC accountant who was a native of the Caribbean island nation of Saint Lucia, while she was off duty, rather than while responding to a reported crime.
Hermus told the jury that when Guyger got to her apartment complex, she parked on the fourth floor instead of the third floor, where she had lived for two months.
When she arrived at what she thought was her unit, she failed to notice the bright red semi-circle welcome mat in front of Jean's apartment, he said.
Jean's apartment was also unlocked, messy and smelled of marijuana, three more signs that should have tipped Guyger off that it was not her apartment, Hermus said.
Despite the clues, she still burst through the door and opened fire, striking Jean once in the chest as he watched television and ate a bowl of vanilla ice cream.
"He was in the sanctuary of his home doing no harm to anyone," Hermus said. "There he lie on his back in his home bleeding to death alone with his killer."
Guyger then called 911.
"I shot a guy thinking it was my apartment," Hermus said, recounting what Guyger told the dispatcher, noting that she never said that Jean posed a threat to her.
Guyger's lawyers are due to make their opening statement later on Monday.
Before opening statements began, state District Judge Tammy Kemp sequestered the jurors, shielding them from possible outside influence and local news coverage of the case.
Kemp also denied a motion to exclude evidence from Guyger's texts and phone calls and a motion for a mistrial from Guyger's attorneys who claimed Dallas District Attorney John Creuzot defied a gag order by giving an interview about the case to a local television station over the weekend.
The district attorney's office reexamined the case after the public protests, and a grand jury in late November indicted Guyger on murder charges, with the maximum punishment of life in prison.
After the incident, she was initially placed on administrative leave but was fired days later.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
